THE NAME AND THE SYMBOL.

Dominion, Volume 6, Issue 1663, 1 February 1913, Page 9

THE NAME AND THE SYMBOL.

: Readers of the life of G. F. Watts will have noted with curiosity that great .artist's aversion: to his own name. He considered it trivial'and uninspiring, and he may, !have envied the eminent man of letters who in the course of his life .was able to link up. the same patronymic with a substantial dissyllable. He was in far better case, however, in respect of his name, than Mr. H.' of Lamb's farce. The latter, it will' bo remembered, - so long as (at Bath) he was known only by his intitial and as a handsome anil exceedingly rich young fellow, was as popular with the ladies as Bunthomo before ' the coming of . Archibald .the Infallible. When, however,- it. came out;.that 'his name in full was Hogsfiesh his reign Was over; thero/Wero exclamations of shocking," "odious," "filthy," and a call for smelling salts,- and even "old : Mother Damnable" would havel nothing more to do with him—ii crisis, it may be noted in -passing, whicli would have been averted: ho pronounced the -.word: as the. Warwickshire family. does, "Oxley.", It. must be added, however, that' Watt-s's .aversion was not. merely sentimental. He -'was as .far away .as possible from' the sickly whim of the seamstress who, after a surfeit of penny novelettes/ wishes she had been' christened Glcndoveer or, at tho vcry. least, Cicely, and for whom'it would." have been . paradise to; have -been '. born into such a title as. one of Poe's heroines, lady Rowena Trevanion de Treniaino. A mystical theory .underlay it. JSe'hcld that a name may be an inspiration; and that with a finer name he might have produced finer /work. It-will suffioe -for his momory that, iike the Roman general who joined; battle, on an ■unlucky day and made it a lucky one for ever after by winning the victory, he did his work upon a commonplace name, and that in such a way that it oan never again be commonplace. - , 'Probably some of the poets have made the same achievement. There must have been; a.time when names "Shelley" and "Keats" seemed trivial. They are remarkable neither. for their . phonetic •value nor for -the picture they call up. But they have bscomo.for us not mere words like other names but symbols of a vast body of poetry, and the association irradiates them -with a . stellar beauty. . 'Tho, English "posts .as a rule, however, have fared very well .at the hands of the nomenclator. "Byron" breathes tho spirit of chivalry, "Swinburne" is patrician and suggests broad acres' 1 well watered and well timbered, whito. "Shakespearo" is martial and plangent, and tho very name ■ for : tho poet of tho historical trngedios. "Whother those names in any degree, in- - spired thoir bearers—whether Longfellow would, with another name, have gono farther, and Ticlcell attained immortality— 'wore to consider too curiously; but, at any rate, a nan>.£, although a mere label arbitrarily attached to a person, comes intime to have subtle mystical relations . with' tho inmost secrecies of his nature. Tennyson t?lls iis that by repeating his own name to himself he oould induce a tr'anco-like state in which "the mortal limit of tho eelf was loo.osd, and passed into,the nameless, as a cloud melts,into heaven." No one in respect of genius could Tk> more different from Tennyson than Maupassant, but Mnunassanl: had a similar experience. "Has it over happened to you,", ho once said to a friend, "to find ,-your own name on your own •lins the oddest thing in the world? It .of ten happens to me. -I pronounce my 'Damn -aloud soveral times in .succession, and by and: by lo.«e All understanding of -it. I am no'loneer conscious of anything. I lose, all memoi'V, and stand there likean idiot (mi hiilluncino) emittingsqUnds the meaning of which I cannot erasp."